Indie rock has always been a fairly insular scene, so when Beirut’s debut album, “Gulag Orkestar,” landed from out of nowhere in 2006, it was like a breath of fresh air—the album ignored genre touchstones like the Velvet Underground and My Bloody Valentine, fusing traditional Eastern European music with lo-fi production and Tin Pan Alley song structures.
The band’s next album, “The Flying Club Cup,” found Beirut moving slightly West, focusing on classic French pop. Now, virtuoso bandleader Zach Condon is, surprise, pulling Beirut in a totally new direction—two directions, in fact. “March of the Zapotec/Holland” is a double EP that balances Mexican folk music and...electronica?
Yeah, Condon knows what you’re thinking—and he agrees.
“It’s obviously odd,” he says. “I had these two disparate elements of music I worked on over the last six months and I had no idea how to put them together. I was going to release the electronic one under a different moniker, but a friend said, ‘You should trust your music enough that people should be able to enjoy them both in their own way.’”
And the album does hang together remarkably well, showing that at the age of 22, Condon is able to tackle just about any kind of music. His next project is figuring out how to make it all work live—without giving listeners musical whiplash.
“Whiplash can be fun actually,” he says, chuckling. “I like it when a song comes out of nowhere. But seriously, [preparing for the live show] takes as long as making the record itself. I’ve been buried in the studio trying to figure out ‘OK, that part is played on keyboard, but what acoustic instrument would it sound good on?’ It’s been a two-month project.”
We talked with Condon about his musical globe-hopping, how movies sent him on a musical path and why he grew up believing that old is always better than new.
So, why Mexican music?
Someone asked me to do the soundtrack to a movie that was being filmed there and sent me field recordings from the state of Oaxaca—funeral and wedding-type music. I fell in love with it. Eventually, the movie thing fell through because the producers wanted to me to work with a string quartet, while I wanted to find the bands in the field recordings and work with them.
Was your obsession with foreign music a way to escape the boredom of teenage life?
Yes. It was total romanticism and daydreaming as a kid. I felt like if I couldn’t live in different worlds, I might as well do something that sounds like it. I grew up in New Mexico, which was a pretty isolated place. You get wanderlust.
How did you discover all these foreign sounds living in such an isolated place?
I didn’t use the Internet much back then—this was before it became everything the way it is today—but I worked in an independent theater that played foreign films. I ran into music around the world through that. I think klezmer music was the first thing I heard, during a Jewish movie.
When Paul Simon first started recording African music, people criticized him for being a cultural scavenger. Are you worried that people could say the same about you?
Totally, and they do. I was in a store that was playing NPR and I heard someone say “You can misunderstand the artist’s references and the place where he’s coming from, but you can’t mis-experience the song itself.” I liked that. What it means to me is that people can moan about where the references come from, but if song is catchy, that’s that.
Do you ever worry that fans will have a hard time following your globe-hopping?
Not really. It’s all in a similar vein. I think part of the reason I loved the music I heard in Mexico was that it sounded so close to the music I was interested in. It was dirges and marches that sounded junky and beautiful. I find it all similar even though the palette changes.
Even with all the world elements in your music, you’re still very associated with Brooklyn. Yet, the so-called “Brooklyn sound” seems to have no effect on what you do.
There is no Brooklyn sound. There’s just a bunch of interesting people here. Brooklyn to me is about being around my peers. It’s fun to walk down the street and run into colleagues and musicians and make connections. There’s something good going on here.
You’ve said that you feel like you’re not connected to your generation. Why?
Growing up, my family only showed respect for things that were aged—and therefore proven. I’m not sure where that came from, but it was strong. As a kid, I would only watch old movies. If my older brother caught me watching an action film, he’d say “You should be watching the classics.”
Your electronic EP is very of-the-moment. Are you finally starting to connect with what most people your age listen to?
Electronic music was always such a private thing for me. I’ve been doing that since I was very young. While I was writing “The Flying Club Cup,” I would take breaks to write these completely giddy computer songs to clear my head. That music was meant to be uninfluenced by anything except the sound itself, so it’s ironic that it’s more modern than anything else I’ve done.
Now that you’ve gotten Mexican music and electronic music out of your system, what part of the world do you want to explore next?
Probably nowhere. I feel like everything’s jumbling together in my head. I feel like I’ve explored all the palettes and now it’s time to look inward for inspiration.
